


Plunge

by seagog



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 18:40:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18394115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seagog/pseuds/seagog
Summary: It's an anonymous summer when everyone learns how the world is going to end.





	Plunge

The water is alive. It swirls and churns with life, fuzzy-edged threads of algae raveling round and round till they're knotted tight, chasing theother in looping coils, a thing with no start and no decipherable end. Silver-scaled fish weave through the web with devilish speed, moving in and out of sight in winking flashes. Here, adrift in this rippling world governed by light and silence, Oscar feels a thousand miles apart from the looming beast in the sky and the insanity that has rolled in with it. The dark mass that’s hurtling itself through space, eating the distance between them with every passing second—it might as well be another pebble sunken deep in the sediment, for all he cares. His brother’s glossed eyes, Ruth’s razor-edged frown: just two more pebbles lost in the murk.

Oscarturns onto his back and peers upward. The lake is broad and deep, but today he finds himself preferring the company of the shallows, where sunlight pierces all the way through to cast a dappled net on the lake floor. Pivoting upright again, he watches the fish, tiny minnows glinting blue-green as they navigate the matrix of sun, calico bass congregating around dense weed beds, the long thin slice of a spotted gar propelling itself through the depths.

He holds his breath until his chest shrinks to the size of a marble, and only then does he breach the skin of the lake, gulping in air and blinking water out of his eyes. Having just risen out of the warm currents, the air is bracing against his skin, and Oscar lets himself sink lower, leaving only his head bobbing above the surface.

There's a girl standing on the shore, a towel in her hands. From his low angle, she looks tall, her body leaning skywards. Her face is bright but sun-worn, and with her faded hair pulled back severely in a utilitarian braid, she looks older than her years. Ruth. His stomach churns.

"I thought I'd find you here." She crosses her arms, and somehow everything about her becomes even more contracted, even more turned-inwards. "I was hoping I'd be wrong."

Oscar sighs and brings a hand up to push the hair away from his eyes. "I like being in the water."

"It's not about what you _like_. It's about staying safe."

Reluctant, Oscar swims to the shore and clambers onto land. The wind-chill is merciless now, and he wraps his bony arms around himself while the girl looks on passionlessly. Standing on the marshy sand, he feels loose-footed, undone. He is unsteady without the firm push-pull of the water to counteract his every movement. In the shallow pool where the lake surrenders to the land, the water licks and nips at his ankles like a wayward puppy while the air bears down on him, cold and uncaring.

"I missed another drill, huh?" he hisses through chattering teeth.

Ruth shakes her head. “Forget about the drills—they know about as much as we do. But you’re not doing yourself any favors coming out here alone. You could be—”

“What?” he has to hold back a snort. “Stocking up on flashlights and toilet paper? Fighting someone at the grocery store for the last can of beans? That’ll do me a lot of good.”

Ruth chews at her lip and stares at the ground, hurt. Seeing her _here_ of all places is strange. Anachronistic. As kids, they’d played together in this lake, teaching themselves how to swim in its shallows, but she’d grown away from the water while he’d rooted himself in its banks like an old oak. He can’t remember the last time the two of them were in this situation, standing together at their old swimming hole.

Now that she’s standing here again, he can’t help but see a double-image when he looks at Ruth: the tiny girl with pink-and-orange floaties around her chubby arms, a soggy Band-Aid peeling off her knee, and the current one, who’s all wrong somehow, gray and steely and hardened in new places. She fits right in against the copse of hollowed-out trees and dead grass.

He takes her silence as an opportunity to strike again. "I mean, what does it matter?" Oscar says, his voice flat. "If it comes, what's it matter if I'm at home, or in the shelter, or out swimming? It’s all the same then, isn’t it?"

"Don't talk like that," Ruth says. "I’m serious. It freaks me out."

"That's not an answer.”

Ruth huffs and throws the towel at him. It strikes him squarely in the chest and he has to make a quick grab to keep it from falling into the grass. “You’re gonna freeze out here, you know that,” she says coldly.

“I’ll be fine.”

 

* * *

 

Now where is he?He promises her he’ll be there the next time she calls. He drifts around without the steady counterweight of the water, aimless, walking the perimeter of his neighborhood with his gaze dragging against the sidewalk.

Oscar is graceless as he stumbles over the threshold and into the confines of his home. He carries the wind in with him. The day is as cold and gray as the one that came before it, and the one that will come after it. He doesn’t bother to lock the door after he closes it; what’s the point, anyway? The house is a myth. The indoors and outdoors are separated by a bedsheet, a napkin, a paper wall that will come to pieces if Oscar just huffs and puffs and blows it all down.

His brother doesn’t look up at the sound of his clumsy entrance. Upon closer examination, he realizes that Richie’s asleep in his usual spot, sprawled over the loveseat with his long coltish limbs spilling outwards, his legs dangling off the couch’s arm. One hand is still digging into a family-sized bag of Doritos tucked by his side.

The television is on, and it’s turned to Channel 11—must be a mandatory broadcast, since he knows Richie never strays outside his pick of shows. The reporter onscreen is unthreatening and pleasant, her dark hair twisted into a bun, lips stained an inoffensive shade of coral pink. She could pass for a kindergartener teacher, or perhaps someone who plays one on a cable television show. Instead, she's on Channel 11, standing in front of a digital mockup of the comet that is hurtling towards Earth at this very moment, coming to you live now, breaking, breaking.

"Astrologists are reporting that there's a 58% chance that Comet Luna's trajectory will veer off course within the next three days and bypass Earth altogether," she says, calmly, and the words look so tidy and reasonable coming from her mouth.

Looking outside the living room window, Oscar isn't sure what he expected. Mobs of people, screaming, yelling, travelling in great big murderous throngs? Children running crying down the street, dogs turned feral, nosing the air in search of their next meal?

Instead, his street is silent to the point of death. Every house has their windows shuttered. The sidewalks are lonely with disuse, populated only with the odd pigeon. If anything's really changed, it's the atmosphere, thickening and broiling over until Oscar finds it hard to breathe at all. The rooftops hoist up the sinking sky, straining under its unfathomable weight. It's only a matter of time until the shingles crack and the whole weight of cosmos comes crashing down to flatten everything: the houses, the beige lawns, the pigeons. The people.

“In the meantime, experts urge citizens to prepare themselves for disaster. Make sure you have enough potable water, food, and batteries to last yourself—”

Oscar picks up the remote and slams his thumb down on the power button, because he might combust if he listens to her for one more second, if he has to hear about how a twenty-four pack of bottled water and extra AA batteries are going to save the planet from choking in the aftermath of its annihilation. Run on sentence? He shakes his head and heads for his room down the hall. As he walks in, he looks up at the smattering of posters that decorate his otherwise unassuming quarters. A picture hangs above his headboard: a candid shot of him and Ruth, the two of them smiling, her arms wrapped around him from behind in a bear hug, hair askew and eyes crinkled with mirth. He lingers on the photo for a heartbeat; it feels like looking through a misted window. He flings himself onto the bed and shuts his eyes. It isn’t like swimming.

Sometime later, Oscar is jolted from his shallow sleep by the sound of the television calling him all the way from the living room. He groans into his pillow and trudges back into the living room. “Can you turn that down?”

“Mm-hmm,” says Richie without moving. He’s awake now, but he looks just as he did asleep, stretched out like a cat with one arm slung lazily over the back of the loveseat. A soft drink is balanced precariously on his stomach.

“What’re you watching?” Oscar ventures.

“Nothing.”

Oscar glances at the screen. Richie’schanged the channel to a children’s show. A cartoon dog chases after a terrified cat, its mouth frothing with white foam, eyes shot red. The cat clambers up a tree in a scurry of claws and fur, but the branch goes _cra-aa-ack_ and she lands on the ground with an exaggerated _thump_ and a cloud of dust. The dog barks with triumph. Richie pitches another chip into his open mouth. Chews. Swallows. Never peels his eyes away from the screen.

The sight of ithits Oscar like a blow to the solar plexus. His brother. Withdrawn. Hollow as a drum. _How easy it must be for him_ , he thinks. Before he’s really even aware of it, Oscar’s feet are carrying him out of the house, clumsily building up to a sprint. Down the street, past the desolate houses, around the corner—there, in the distance, are the first ugly signs of life. He slows at the thick scent of barbecue hanging in the air and the loud music cutting across the lawn. Meat sizzles sumptuously on a grill, red and indulgent before it begins to brown. He stares at the small congregation of people on his neighbor’s lawn. They carry sagging paper plates with their sticky hands, half-bobbing their heads to the cheery music as they go for second helpings of chicken wings and kabobs and lemonade at a table crowded with food. Kids are laughing, chasing each other in a game of tag as their parents look on with affection. End of the world, tonight at my place; bring your own beer.

There’s something sour about it all, grotesque, like a sugared coating on rat poison. Oscar bites his cheek and turns around, headed for the lake.

 

* * *

 

Before the comet, Oscarand Ruth hadbeen headed somewhere, only he wasn’t sure of the destination. He’d only known that being around her dislodged something in his chest, some old hunk of driftwood that had been blocking up all sorts of tubes and cogs inside him, right up until the moment she laughed and all those whirring cogs sprung back to life. These days, that piece of driftwood has tripled in weight and grown jagged at the edges, and he finds that the only place it lightens is in the embrace of the lake.

These days, looking at her makes things worse.

It’s late morning, and they’re sitting across from each other in a booth at the local diner. She’s been coming here nearly every day, and Oscar thinks he knows why. The diner feels normal. It’s one of the few places in town that’s kept its doors open, either because the owner is part of the denialist crowd, or he’s one of the few that have retreated back into the coaxing shelter of routine—whatever the reason, he’s glad. For Ruth’s sake.

“Pancakes, short stack,” she instructs the waitress, tapping her fingers absently on the table. Her nails have been worried down to uneven stumps. She turns to Oscar. “You sure you’re not ordering anything?”

“Just black coffee, please,” he says.

After they order, he supposes that he should say something, but one look at Ruth’s marble face and the driftwood lodges itself into the soft hiding place of his vocal cords. Maybe he shouldask her to go somewhere else, but there’s nowhere: home has nothing to offer him except Richie, and he still can’t get the image of his brother’s bloodshot eyes out of his head.

She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out for a few seconds, until finally she says, “You know it might not even hit us. That’s what all the numbers are saying. It might just pass us by, and everyone will have forgotten about this in a few years.”

“Right.”

Ruth bites her ragged bottom lip. “My dad called me last night. He says the most important thing is getting your hands on a breathing mask. Everybody thinks about food, and shelter, and electricity, see, but you can’t breathe through that kind of ash. It’ll get in your throat and suffocate you.”

“Oh,” he says, and he wishes the waitress would hurry up.

“What’re we going to do, Oscar?” she asks him. “What the hell are we going to do?”

 

* * *

 

 Oscar doesn’t stop running until he’s panting at the water’s edge, shimmying out of his jeans and shirt. He dives in and curls into a ball as the momentum of his plunge carries him down, down, down, to where the bottom-feeders dance through the heavy muck.

Silt swirls around him like something wicked, and he wants to smile, wants to shout. Wants to shed his worn fragile shell. Strings of algae morph into arms that reach out for him hungrily, undulating in the dark, starved.

There are bones at the bottom of the lake. Human, animal, he can’t tell. They’re an unfinished puzzle, a ribcage here, a thigh bone there, all caked with grime, the white just barely peeking through in fearful glimpses. Half-buried in the dirt, they are unbothered by the inhale and exhale of life in the water, a stolid presence in the midst of the curious fish that pirouette through gaps in the ribs and the snails that have made a home on their mossy surfaces. When he spotted them for the first time weeks ago, his heart had jumped into his throat and thoughts of blood had ran amok through his mind, but now, his panic is but a faded imprint. Whatever the creature, it doesn’t matter.

Suspended in the dark space, Oscar stares at the bones until his vision goes blurry. He likes the way they are laid bare. It’s honest. They don’t lie, don’t run, don’t disguise themselves with ribbons and paint. Oscar stays so still that tiny fish swim up to him, unafraid to peck at the calloused skin on his feet. _Let them eat,_ he thinks. _Let them swallow me altogether. Bare my bones._

 

* * *

  

He spends his days in the lake, and if the woman on Channel 11 has anything else to say, he doesn’t hear it. Oscar swims blind, squeezing his eyes shut against the offensive daylight. He is disoriented, his center of gravity askew, but he can still sense the world in bloom around him. He can feel the soft whispering touch of the seagrass against his feet, the slimy scrape of rock when he reaches out his hands to feel along the lake floor. Letting the currents carry him along, Oscar drifts in and out of clouds of cold water, each one sending a hair-trigger pulse of nervous energy down his body.

Counterfeit houses, they'll come falling down at some point, he thinks – but here, there are no walls to break, and the water embraces all. 

He thinks it’s funny, how the water is the only place he can stop holding his breath.

Time passes differently on days like these, so he isn’t sure how long it’s been since their last meeting when he rises and sees Ruth sitting on a rock by the shore.

She’s been crying. She's glaring at him when he approaches, but he feels none of its usual bite; her eyes are puffy-red and they look oddly small and sunken in her face, like they're shrinking away from the act of sight itself. He notices her hair is out of its usual braid. Strands of flyaway silk fall down her shoulders and distract from the deep, unhappy flush of her cheeks.

If he had any words in him, they have swum away in droves, finding dark crevices to gather in until the storm passes.

"You know you're a coward, right," she says, her hands clenched tight as if to hold back a secret in her palms. "You have to know that."

Without warning, anger flares quick and hot in Oscar's chest, a violent indignation warming him from the inside out. This day is full of surprises. "What in the world are you talking about?"

"All you've done is run away," Ruth says. "You won't face this head on, or you can't, but what the hell's even the difference? None of us can. But at least I'm trying. I thought—I thought you'd at least try. I thought you had it in you. But all you've done is stick your head in the water and waste whatever time we— _you've_ got left, and, well, guess what, Oscar? There's no getting away from this.

“I’m not running away,” he says. Already the anger subsides, a tide receding from the shoreline. “And I think I might be the only one.”

“Liar.” The double-image of Ruth flickers and condenses into one, the little girl and the stone-faced statue merging together.

“I mean it,” he replies, and he swallows, extends his hand to her. Palm turned up to the sky. Vulnerable. “Let me show you.”

For a moment he’s scared she won’t move, or that she’ll get up from her rock and walk away until she vanishes, but instead she glares at him and takes his hand.

They walk to a rocky outcropping overlooking the deep point of the lake, and he says, “Don’t think.”

Oscar tightens his grip on her hand. In one swift movement, he jumps off the edge and pulls her down with him.

“ _Hey!_ ”

Her responding yelp is cut short when they plunge into the water. The combined weight of their bodies is an anchor, a rock, a sinking stone. Through a screen of bubbles, he sees Ruth’s shocked face, softened slightly by the yellow plume of hair fanning out behind her. A shudder ripples up her body as she reacts to the cold. Still, she doesn’t let go of his hand, and together they descend past the minnows and the eels and the fingers of algae, down to where the bones lay in wait. Not even sunlight reaches here. They won’t ever have to emerge, he thinks, and he prays they’ll never be found.


End file.
